Post by Bonobo on Oct 6, 2018 23:50:30 GMT 1

Local elections 2018Polish councils, municipalities, counties and generally local administration in Poland do a good job and are a good example to follow by neighbouring countries where administration has still been too centralised. Read about it on a Ukrainian site

voxukraine.org/en/37/Poland demonstrates a successful case of transition from a centralized communist state to a decentralized local government system. The transition in Poland was made possible through persistent negotiations, trials and legislative amendments regarding various aspects including administrative division, responsibilities, and financing. This experience is highly informative for Ukraine in building a democratic country based on the principles of decentralization. In fact, the survival of Ukraine as a unitary country depends on delegation of power to local governments.

Post by Bonobo on Oct 28, 2018 10:48:06 GMT 1

In some parts of Poland, which are less conservative, it is possible for non native Polish residents to win elections. This is a Syrian Kurdish man with Polish citizenship - Shivan Fate, elected to a local council.

Post by Bonobo on Dec 16, 2018 21:21:10 GMT 1

So far municipal district elections have been combined with mayor and local parliament ones. This year it was different. So, we went to third elections.District councils deal with such local matters as car parks, sidewalks, playgrounds, street lighting, new traffic lights and crossings etc. They mostly suggest what should be done but also have their own budget for small scale improvements.

The turnout is the lowest of all - about 10 - 15% voters are interested.

In Krakow there are officially 14 districts, although historical ones amount to about 7.

Post by Bonobo on Dec 21, 2018 8:35:31 GMT 1

It favours big parties, that is why PiS which got 38% support in 2015 was able to gain the majority in the Parliament. The D'Hondt method or the Jefferson method is a highest averages method for allocating seats, and is thus a type of party-list proportional representation. The method described is named in the United States after Thomas Jefferson, who introduced the method for proportional allocation of seats in the United States House of Representatives in 1791, and in Europe after Belgian mathematician Victor D'Hondt, who described it in 1878 for proportional allocation of parliamentary seats to the parties. There are two forms: closed list (a party selects the order of election of their candidates) and an open list (voters' choices determine the order).

Proportional representation systems aim to allocate seats to parties approximately in proportion to the number of votes received. For example, if a party wins one-third of the votes then it should gain about one-third of the seats. In general, exact proportionality is not possible because these divisions produce fractional numbers of seats. As a result, several methods, of which the D'Hondt method is one, have been devised which ensure that the parties' seat allocations, which are of whole numbers, are as proportional as possible.[1] In comparison, Sainte-Laguë method, a divisor method, reduces the reward to large parties, and it generally has benefited middle-size parties at the expense of both large and small parties.[2] Meanwhile, empirical studies show that the D’Hondt method is one of the least proportional among the proportional representation methods. The D'Hondt slightly favours large parties and coalitions over scattered small parties.[3][4][5][6] The axiomatic properties of the D’Hondt method were studied and they proved that the D’Hondt method is the unique consistent, monotone, stable, and balanced method that encourages coalitions.[7][8] A method is consistent if it treats parties which received tied vote equally. By monotonicity, the number of seats provided to any state or party will not decrease if the house size increases. A method is stable if two merged parties would neither gain nor lose more than one seat. By coalition encouragement of the D’Hondt method, any alliance cannot lose the seat.

The system has also been used for the "top-up" seats in the London Assembly; in some countries for elections to the European Parliament; and during the 1997 Constitution era to allocate party-list parliamentary seats in Thailand.[9] A modified form was used for elections in the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly, but this was abandoned in favour of the Hare-Clark system. The system is also used in practice for the allocation between political groups of a large number of posts (Vice Presidents, committee chairmen and vice-chairmen, delegation chairmen and vice-chairmen) in the European Parliament and for the allocation of ministers in the Northern Ireland Assembly.